Lawmakers, tech to W.H. to talk NSA

The White House is planning a series of meetings this week on NSA practices with members of Congress, the intelligence community and the technology industry as it prepares to unveil proposed surveillance reforms.

President Barack Obama is due to meet Thursday with lawmakers from the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees and sit down separately Wednesday with intelligence officials and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the White House said.

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Technology companies have also been invited to a White House meeting this week, according to industry sources. That meeting is being billed, according to one tech representative, as a follow-up to Obama’s face-to-face session in December with more than a dozen technology executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Many of the companies urged the president to “move aggressively” on NSA reform after the meeting.

The new round of gatherings comes as Obama prepares to outline his vision for NSA reforms ahead of his Jan. 28 State of the Union address. The White House has been reviewing the recommendations made by the president’s surveillance review panel, which was convened to look at NSA practices in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks. Those recommendations included having telecoms or a third-party organization, rather than NSA, hold telephone call records.

“Since the summer, including since receiving the Review Group’s report last month, senior members of the President’s national security team have hosted meetings with privacy and civil liberties groups, the tech community, Congress, our foreign partners and others as we review our signals intelligence programs,” National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in a statement. “The President will also hold meetings with individuals with a variety of perspectives as we near the final stages of our ongoing internal review.”

Congressional aides have also been invited to a briefing with White House staff in the Situation Room on Wednesday, and civil society groups say they are attending a privacy-oriented meeting with White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler on Thursday. The White House declined to comment on those meetings and on the session with tech companies.

As intelligence reform remains a hot topic on Capitol Hill, the surge of meetings at the White House could indicate that the administration’s thinking on tweaks to intelligence changes is starting to solidify. The Los Angeles Times reported last Friday, for example, that Obama is likely to recommend that a public advocate be allowed to argue before the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

In addition, Obama and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney have said that perhaps the most controversial review panel suggestion — that the NSA’s massive database of domestic phone records be controlled by telephone companies or a third party instead of the government — is one that the administration has been studying. The phone industry and privacy groups, however, both have major concerns with the idea.

The president and his advisers continue to review the more than 300-page report, Carney said during Tuesday’s press briefing.

“We know with confidence that the president will have made some decisions about which recommendations that he wants to implement, which require further review, and which we will not implement and you will hear him discuss those issues later this month,” Carney said.